1. Not once was behavior mentioned. Where is behavior addressed in MYP? Behavior is
still addressed in our program, it is just not a factor included in a measure of learning.
Our staff has revised our assessment policy and included a “Life Skills” grade. The life
skills grade reflects the student’s self-management skills, social skills, and organization.
Each teacher maintains a running record of the child’s ability to maintain a positive
attitude, come prepared to class with supplies, materials, and assignments, and maintain
a satisfactory level of motivation and engagement to succeed. This grade will be reported
out on progress reports and report cords. Teachers will still be able to comment on
behavior in the ways they have always done (conferences, comments on report cards,
etc., emails, phone calls, etc.).
2. Are all IB schools (Northview or South Iredell HS) grading this way? How do you
maintain objectivity and quantify the MYP score? Many IB schools do grade this way,
but not the majority of the US schools. The other two IB schools in Iredell County are
continuing to work on adopting this practice.
To maintain objectivity, teachers have uniform subject specific rubrics that are developed
to determine the level at which a student is performing. These rubrics are modified for
each specific task and are less subjective than many traditional grading practices. Our
teachers will also be sharing assessments and scoring each other’s assessments in order
to insure rating fidelity.
3. As a parent, do I make the correction on his homework or leave it the way it is to show
his understanding? While certainly helping a child with homework is not rejected, it is
always better to lead a student to find their own mistakes and make those corrections.
Homework is practice for instruction to come or practice of learning that has already
occurred. It is not graded, and as such is the perfect opportunity to make mistakes and
learn from them.
4. Can teachers attach an explanation with scores on individual assignments? (If they get a
“4”, how will they know what they were lacking?) The task-specific rubric for each
assessment explains the indicators that should be present at each level. Teachers review
these with students prior to the assessment and after. Authentic feedback is given on the
assignment when it is assessed relative to the rubric indicators.
5. What if a student always gets 7’s & 8’s, will there be a penalty for “lack of growth” or
how is this addressed? In that case, teachers would need to find alternative, more
challenging assignments or extensions of existing assignments to fit that child’s ability
level.
6. If MMS was always focused on process more than product, weren’t we already
promoting development of higher-order cognitive skills? Higher-order cognitive skills
have been the focus of instruction for quite some time now. What has changed at MM is
that we will only report performance on assessments that could allow for a child to reach
that highest level. Assessments that only ask for recall or description will not be reported
in an official way.
7. If the new system is “what you learned, not what you earned” then how is a judgment
made when the score is on the fence? The teacher would need to look at other
assignments that were not scored using the MYP rubrics or at group work that was not
assessed by an MYP rubric. This will require teachers to know students and their
learning more deeply and more intimately than they have in the past.
8. How does this new grading criteria match EOG tests? EOG tests have not been connected
with local grades in the past and the new tests that will be administered will not match
this grading scheme either.
9. How does this prepare for college? Colleges will not look at the grades a student earned
in middle school.
10. Will each topic in a subject have this grading? If so, how do we see progress on that
topic? Each subject has its own set of criteria on which students will be assessed. All
subjects have rubrics that are used when assessing learning. In the teachers electronic
grade-book, we have broken the reporting into categories that match the different criteria
for that subject, that way you can see the learning progress on a particular criteria. The
students will have an assessment folder for each class. This folder will house all assessed
work (both formative and summative).This should give parents a way to talk to the
student about their progress as they move toward an assessment.
11. Will not having homework to balance out their grades, hurt their grades? Homework was
never a large percentage of a student’s final grade. Homework now will not be factored
into the score that is used to report the progress of student learning. Homework will be
used as feedback to a student on how he/she is progressing in the skills and learning
needed for an upcoming assessment. At Mount Mourne we Effort on homework will be
reflected in the student’s life skills grade.